This elaborate and weighty tome reports, and where it does not merely
report it creates, the essential points of the managerial vision of the
present and future of graduate education in the arts and sciences. The
statistical apparatus is colossal, and the prose is the sort that
accompanies a colossal statistical apparatus.
The sometime president of Princeton and the present president of Harvard,
colleagues at the Mellon foundation for the last five years and before
that for twenty years at Princeton, are men not without clout in our
profession, and their words have the
same creative force as the divine Logos in Genesis. The approach is
fundamentally conservative, in an institutional sense. No thought is given
to any systemic or structural change; no mention is made of the sharp
criticism that the contemporary academy
receives from outside, and the threats that criticism brings with it. The
heated debates inside the academy about new methodologies and principles
in the humanities particularly evoke embarrassed and clumsy response: an
appendix on 'Theory and Its
Ramifications' reads like a decent enough graduate school term paper, but
it is acutely limited. Finally, this e-zealot reviewer scanned the pages
keenly but in vain for any slightest sign that any change to the
structure, substance, or management of graduate
education might be expected to arise from the impending electronic
revolutions.

The issue they address is a matter of productivity:
why are graduate programs so slow and so inefficient? Why do only 50-odd%
of those who start PhD programs finish them (when 90% of those in -- MBA
and JD programs do so)? Why does it take the finishers so long? They
conceive these questions as identifying a waste of
resources and they look to enhance the efficiency of the system. (They
began their study in response to a perceived 30% increase in
time-to-degree, but conclude that the actual increase has been only about
10% over the last two decades.) The problems are not new: they quote a
1960 study quoting distinguished deans and faculty
(e.g., Jacques Barzun) lamenting the same problems in the same terms that
one hears today.

The work is a tissue of statistics. Their
special collection is a data set from ten elite universities, and within
those universities they emphasize six fields (English, history, political
science, economics, mathematics, and physics). Their numbers have numerous
points of interest. It is striking to see that the decline in
PhD production in the early 70s and after began not with the great job
crisis of c. 1971 but with the end of the draft deferment for graduate
work in 1967. Had Lyndon Johnson not taken away that artificial stimulus
to pursue wisdom beyond the BA, there
might have been thousands more PhD's driving cabs by now. The end of the
draft deferment, the job crunch, and the generation-long flight from arts
and science BA programs are all to blame. (Subjectivity has a selective,
and important memory, and so the job
market has been, since about 1971, the universal excuse for failure of
every kind: it is as though we forget that there were plenty of failures
before 1971, and that the reasons for failure are sometimes to be
linked
to the personal inadequacies of the candidates. And the job market is
spoken of in two modes these last twenty
years: bad, and worse. The authors do not address the power of this fear
very directly.)

They show as well that national fellowship
programs for distinguished undergraduates are not very good at boosting
productivity. The most eye-opening figures reveal that the national Mellon
fellowship program the authors inherited (and that has just awarded its
last prizes) produced an initial cadre of 94 students in 1983
of whom, eight years later, 33 have so far donned the doctoral robes. Of
the first two cadres, totalling 210 BA's, 17 got their PhD within five
years, and 25 more finished during their sixth year, leaving at that
point 168 still slogging away. Only NSF fellowships (not Danforths, not
Whitings, not Woodrow Wilsons, not Mellons) have any noticeable
correlation with reduced time-to-degree and reduced attrition. There is an
unsurprising statistical correlation between shorter time-to-degree and
promotion to tenure, but talent is the unexamined factor in both: and of
course the tenure clock favors those who can get serious work done in six
years or less.

The authors show that lack of financial support is
crippling; but they also show that form of support does not appreciably
matter. Students receiving TA-ships and students receiving string-free
fellowships show no significant variation in tenacity or speed. (The
authors clearly do not quite approve of TA's -- their Princeton background
shows here -- but they leave room for the argument that TA-ships may in
fact be the most cost-effective form of support institutions can provide.)
They do not address the question of the optimum level of funding, and this
seems a lack: surely if graduate students were given fellowships amounting
to, say, $40,000 a year, they would stay forever and so never finish. If
given support of $2,000 a year, they would bail out quickly and so never
finish. Where in between is the optimum payment that
keeps body and soul together but still urges the recipient on to finish
faster and get the heck out of grad school?

The crucial
turning-point? That moment when course-work is completed and the
dissertation must be faced. The systemic weakness is that we treat new
graduate students as superannuated and underprivileged undergraduates,
expecting them to 'take courses' and 'write papers', things they have been
doing for years (the move away
from examinations towards term papers for undergraduates over the last
decades has probably helped blur the line further); and then suddenly, two
or three years later, we expect them to break out of the chrysalis and fly
on their own power. No easy stunt;
no wonder many fall flat on their faces. (A personal hobby-horse of mine
has been to ask, and keep asking, why graduate students are charged
'tuition': not only does that gum up the economics of the situation, but
it also perpetuates the notion that
these are not apprentice colleagues but just old and tired pupils. I have
asked repeatedly at several institutions, and once addressed one of the
authors of this book privately with the same query, just how much 'hard
currency' graduate tuition brings in -- most likely in funds accompanying
science grants; much if not most of the
rest is out-of-one-pocket-into-the-other financial aid, of course -- and
never gotten a decisive answer. Deans don't want to tell you, while the
Mellon man appealed, rightly, to the
incredible complexity and variability of the issue. If we could live
without the subsidy of that 'tuition' income, then more people could
decide to take a chance on themselves and make less artificial economic
decisions about how long to continue. But
most of all, we could begin to treat them with the respect they deserve.)

One fundamental assumption is unaddressed and seems to me at
least questionable. Why do we worry about attrition? Why do we worry about
time-to-degree? Are these not questions for the students, not the
administrators? Does it not make sense that in a difficult, high-stress
professional engagement, some will be found not
satisfactory? That personal as well as intellectual qualities will hold
some back? That would seem to be a common-sense reading of what we in fact
see in our programs. Do we conclude that we must change the programs to
accommodate those qualities? That we
must do everything in our power to reduce the possibility of failure? Why?
A culture that struggles so hard to forbid failure runs the risk of
encouraging mediocrity. The good will is unmistakable: but it raises the
further question nowhere here addressed
-- What is a PhD? Is it a professional certificate like an MBA or a JD,
where you show up, go through the motions, learn some stuff, and go off to
fame and glory, having learned at least how not to embarrass yourself? The
authors do not adduce attrition
rates from medical school, and I wonder if that is not because PhD
programs more closely resemble medical training as a whole-person ordeal,
sorting sheep from goats.

But the implicit culture of the
institution of course speaks in favor of compassion and support; and it
cannot be denied that we give too little of that. The nub of the problem
seems in the end personal: Ch. 13, 'Program Design, Oversight, and "Culture"'
speaks to the underlying disorganization, bad management, and
irresponsibility of faculty and departments. If there is a solution to any
of the problems outlined here, it is to be found at that intractable
level. How institutions, much less foundations, can affect behavior at
that level seems to me a very dark question. A
fundamental cultural change would be required, one I do not see occurring
in my lifetime. I wonder how many shared my own attitude, that I loved the
academic life but hated graduate school and so took no prisoners in
my Stakhanovite drive to get out as
quickly as possible. It makes for a comical chapter in my unwritten
autobiography, but the surprising thing is that it was an effective and
successful motivation. Many others are ensnared by the womb-like culture
of graduate-dom, where as long as you are
willing to live in modest surroundings and do without a car, you get
insulation from the grown-up world and four months' vacation a year. It is
probably less pleasant than what awaits on the other side, but the trauma
of transition is so great for many that endless adolescence becomes in
fact the de facto preference. Perhaps the
lesson is that, just as there is an optimum level of inadequate funding,
so there is an optimum level of abuse and mistreatment!

Now in
fairness it should be admitted that no academic is really qualified to
review this book. We have too much vested interest. We can argue
with it, resist it, and occasionally give in to it with ill grace. Coming
from
authoritative sources, it defines the future for us; make no mistake, this
book makes a major political
statement, and it will be quoted and brandished by graduate deans for some
time to come. Will the marginal and incremental modifications of
established policy they recommend make a difference?